Recent data suggests that nearly eighty-five percent of all data is found in computing files and growing annually at around sixty percent. One reason for the growth is that regulatory compliance acts, statutes, etc., (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, PCI) force companies to keep file data in an accessible state for extended periods of time. However, block level operations in computers are too lowly to apply any meaningful interpretation of this stored data beyond taking snapshots and block de-duplication. While other business intelligence products have been introduced to provide capabilities greater than block-level operations, they have been generally limited to structured database analysis. They are much less meaningful when acting upon data stored in unstructured environments.
Unfortunately, entities the world over have paid enormous sums of money to create and store their data, but cannot find much of it later in instances where it is haphazardly arranged or arranged less than intuitively. Not only would locating this information bring back value, but being able to observe patterns in it might also prove valuable despites its usefulness being presently unknown. However, entities cannot expend so much time and effort in finding this data that it outweighs its usefulness. Notwithstanding this, there are still other scenarios, such as government compliance, litigation, audits, etc., that dictate certain data/information be found and produced, regardless of its cost in time, money and effort. Thus, a clear need is identified in the art to better find, organize and identify digital data, especially data left in unstructured states.
In search engine technology, large amounts of unrelated and unstructured digital data can be quickly gathered. However, most engines do little to organize the data other than give a hierarchical presentation. Also, when the engine finds duplicate versions of data, it offers few to no options on eliminating the replication or migrating/relocating redundancies. Thus, a further need in the art exists to overcome the drawbacks of search engines.
When it comes to large amounts of data, whether structured or not, compression techniques have been devised to preserve storage capacity, reduce bandwidth during transmission, etc. With modern compression algorithms, however, they simply exist to scrunch large blocks of data into smaller blocks according to their advertised compression ratios. As is known, some do it without data loss (lossless) while others do it “lossy.” None do it, unfortunately, with a view toward recognizing similarities in the data itself.
From biology, it is known that highly similar species have highly similar DNA strings. In the computing context, consider two word processing files relating to stored baseball statistics. In a first file, words might appear for a baseball batter, such as “batting average,” “on base percentage,” and “slugging percentage,” while a second file might have words for a baseball pitcher, such as “strikeouts,” “walks,” and “earned runs.” Conversely, a third file wholly unrelated to baseball, statistics or sports, may have words such as “environmental protection,” “furniture,” or whatever comes to mind. It would be exceptionally useful if, during times of compression, or upon later manipulation by an algorithm if “mapping” could recognize the similarity in subject matter in the first two files, although not exact to one another, and provide options to a user. Appreciating that the “words” in the example files are represented in the computing context as binary bits (1's or 0's), which occurs by converting the English alphabet into a series of 1's and 0's through application of ASCII encoding techniques, it would be further useful if the compression algorithm could first recognize the similarity in subject matter of the first two files at the level of raw bit data. The reason for this is that not all files have words and instead might represent pictures (e.g., .jpeg) or spread sheets of numbers.
Appreciating that certain products already exist in the above-identified market space, clarity on the need in the art is as follows. One, present day “keyword matching” is limited to select set of words that have been pulled from a document into an index for matching to the same exact words elsewhere. Two, “Grep” is a modern day technique that searches one or more input files for lines containing an identical match to a specified pattern. Three, “Beyond Compare,” and similar algorithms, are line-by-line comparisons of multiple documents that highlight differences between them. Four, block level data de-duplication has no application in compliance contexts, data relocation, or business intelligence.
The need in the art, on the other hand, needs to serve advanced notions of identifying new business intelligence, conducting operations on completely unstructured or haphazard data, and organizing it, providing new useful options to users, providing new user views, providing new encryption products, identifying highly similar data, and identifying patterns of information within such similar data which contributes to the determination of similarity, and utilizing these patterns to find similar data in a general population of files, to name a few. As a byproduct, solving this need will create new opportunities in minimizing transmission bandwidth and storage capacity, among other things. Naturally, any improvements along such lines should contemplate good engineering practices, such as stability, ease of implementation, unobtrusiveness, etc.